Wednesday 27 October 2010 03.00 EDT
First published on Wednesday 27 October 2010 03.00 EDT

This week saw the anniversary of John Peel's death, six years ago on Monday. He was often mentioned in the campaign to save 6Music, a station many regard as encapsulating his spirit of musical adventure. It seems right and proper, then, that his son Tom Ravenscroft should have ended up at 6Music: he took over the Friday night 9pm-midnight slot in June and has made it a thing of utter delight.

He has also made it very much his own terrain. Sure, there are times when he echoes Peel's intonation so closely that you do a double-take at the radio. In last week's show, he found a second mention of a birthday in a listener text. "We have another birthday," he said, in the beginnings of a harrumph. "I can see this escalating." He also has his father's likably deadpan tone. "I'm wildly, wildly excited," he said of a guest mix from The Black Twig Pickers, sounding a long way from wildly anything.

But it's the music you notice most, with the focus squarely on the brand new. Features include Tom Capsule, where a listener suggests two tracks (one well known, one obscure) and an object from a past year. "I don't really play any music from the 1950s [up until] about eight months ago," he said, claiming not to know much about older music, which surely can't be the case, but cleverly carving out a slightly different territory from his father. Like Peel's show, though, it features bands whose names make you chuckle. "This is Shit Horse," he said, all matter of fact. I also enjoyed Scum of Toytown, a listener choice from 1994.

Ravenscroft's show is a slightly easier listen than his father's, with less of the challenging collisions – new, old, ear-bleedingly raw, devilishly weird – Peel used to concoct. For that, there's the breathtakingly varied Dandelion Radio, official home to the Festive 50. Voting for this year's chart has just opened.